4. Katherine Schütz Zell and Protestant Reformers
4
Katherine Schütz Zell and Protestant Reformers
“I guess, what I will tell you now, won’t make you very happy. Most of them say you are a feminist. But I don’t think so. What do you think about that accusation? I hope I did not hurt you.” These sentences are part of an email message sent from a young man studying at a Bible college in Switzerland. He and his fellow students had read some of my writings, and they were curious about me. Who am I? That is essentially what the suspicious students want to know. No, I wasn’t offended at all.
Labeling and name-calling are how we differentiate ourselves from others, particularly those whom we perceive to believe and act differently in ways we don’t approve. I’ve certainly been guilty of that, and it’s not all bad. These students labeled me and in doing so sparked conversation. What is a feminist? Is it a bad thing to be a feminist? As a historian, I’m wary about using the word when discussing individuals who lived in earlier generations. Is a feminist one who supports women’s suffrage? Today in the West a woman’s right to vote and hold office is simply assumed. But in their day, suffragists were considered feminists and liberals.
Today many Christians would label one who supports women’s ordination a feminist, but many such feminists hark back to the apostle Paul and his affirmation of women in ministry (when there were no such credentials as ordination per se). They would also point to the succeeding generations when women held important roles in the developing church—for example, Marcella and Paula advising and speaking for Jerome on theological matters. Then throughout medieval times women wielded power as abbesses and served in significant roles during the Reformation.
But it is during this Reformation era that name-calling and labeling of women really began in earnest. Protestants disdained monasticism, which incidentally had been the primary path to ministry for women. Indeed, we find Reformers and their minions emptying out convents, leaving nuns in precarious positions. Find them husbands lest worse befall them, is the cry. Many women, among them nuns, however, welcomed the changes in the air. Martin Luther was condemning the excesses of the church, as others before him had done, reproving ignorant priests and calling for a focus on the Bible. It was a time of radical notions, including the priesthood of the believer.
Women as believers are now part of the priesthood. It almost sounds as rash as the New Testament itself: “You are . . . a royal priesthood . . . that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light” (1 Pet. 2:9). And some women took such words seriously. They wanted to be a part of this new movement, not as mere bystanders but as outspoken activists. Reformers both needed them and feared them. In fact, every new movement needs all the help it can muster, and thus we typically find women more prominent in such instances. When the religious movement becomes established as a regulated hierarchy, women’s roles are typically diminished.
John Wesley’s movement that would become known as Methodism is an example. Women preachers were common in his day, but not after the fledgling company of believers became an established church. The situation was not entirely different during the onset of the Protestant Reformation. No longer priests, preachers had wives, some of them as independent and outspoken as Katie Luther and Katherine Zell. Martin Luther welcomed the strong-minded support of Argula von Stauffer, and Calvin similarly relied on both Jeanne d’Albret and Renée of Ferrara. And the Anabaptists simply recruited converts and transformed them into evangelists whether a man or an Elizabeth Dirks.
KATHERINE SCHÜTZ ZELL
Reformer from Strasburg
She was a strong, articulate, and very vocal woman who grew up in a respectable Strasburg family. But as a woman she knew well how to be self-deprecating, often with a touch of humor. Whether she was merely “a splinter from the rib of that blessed man Matthew Zell”1 or one who had as much right to speak for God as did Balaam’s ass, she argued her case. She was a controversial writer and speaker who skillfully supported her positions with scriptural texts.
Perhaps more than any Christian woman before her, Katherine was a defender of women’s roles in ministry—and a defender of what she was convinced were true Christian precepts. She spoke out with conviction on the critical importance of Scripture, hymn singing, and religious liberty. But her first published apologetical work was in defense of clerical marriage. In early December 1524, at twenty-six, she married Matthew Zell, twenty years her senior, the most popular preacher in town. The age difference, however, was far less significant than his vow of celibacy.
Not surprisingly, the marriage created an uproar resulting in his excommunication from the Catholic Church. Katherine was sensitive about her own reputation and particularly how laypeople would regard the scandal. So she turned the tables: Why shouldn’t the church support a priest who marries and is faithful to his wife? Everyone knows that priests certainly don’t practice celibacy. Is it because, she boldly demanded, the bishops pocket the monetary fines they collect from the priests who live with their mistresses? And how many priests are sneaking around seducing women? Their sexual sins are hardly a secret.
Indeed, Katherine went on to explain that she regarded marriage to a priest as a ministry that “uplifted the moral degradation of the clergy.” And from all indications, their union was a model of clerical marriage—a warm and healthy partnership with no apparent effort on Matthew’s part to stifle his outspoken wife. When someone started a rumor that he had “thrashed” her (or ought to have thrashed her) for neglecting the house while spending her time speaking her mind, she shot back: “I have never had a maid. . . . And as for thrashing me, my husband and I have never had an unpleasant 15 minutes. We could have no greater honor than to die rejected of men and from two crosses to speak to each other words of comfort.”2
We can also infer from Katherine’s writing that she and Matthew enjoyed laughter and lightheartedness. When he died less than a year shy of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, she was bowed down in grief. Sometime later she wrote a note of apology to houseguests: “I wish I could have done better for you but my Matthew has taken all my gaiety with him.”3
Active involvement in ministry helped Katherine work through her grief. For the remaining fourteen years of her life, she would serve others until her health gave out. She could look back on more than a half century of dedication to God: “Ever since I was ten years old I have been a student and sort of church mother, much given to attending sermons. I have loved and frequented the company of learned men, and I conversed much with them, not about dancing, masquerades, and worldly pleasures but about the kingdom of God.”4
For their entire childless marriage, Katherine served alongside her husband in the local parish. The first enormous responsibility to fall on her shoulders as a young minister’s wife was heading a taskforce to house refugees. The Peasants’ War of 1625 had left behind widows and orphans; some three thousand refugees had fled their homes, seeking food and shelter in Strasburg. She tirelessly organized the effort and welcomed many into her own home, which throughout their marriage served as a hospitality house—and not just to the homeless.
We imagine Matthew beaming with pride when they entertained notable guests who were impressed that his wife interacted so intelligently on matters of doctrine that she ranked alongside theologians. Her feelings were mutual: “I honored, cherished and sheltered many great, learned men, with care, work and expense. . . . I listened to their conversations and preaching, I read their books and their letters and they were glad to receive mine.”5
She may have collaborated with Matthew in his catechism for children, and she was actively involved in ministry to the needy. Following her husband’s death, however, she was forced to defend her public speaking and preaching. In fact, so involved had she been alongside her husband that she, amid her grief, felt obligated at his funeral to dispel rumors that she would take over the pulpit as Dr. Katherine: “I am not usurping the office of preacher or apostle. I am like the dear Mary Magdalene, who with no thought of being an apostle, came to tell the disciples that she had encountered the risen Lord.”6
Whether or not she carried out the work of an apostle, there was very little that Katherine did not do. She was a tenacious defender of the persecuted Anabaptists, daring to defy Reformation leaders who were in some instances guilty of executions and outright brutality. “Why do you rail at Schwenckfeld?” she demanded of a Lutheran clerical leader. “You talk as if you would have him burned like the poor Servetus at Geneva”—an obvious jab at John Calvin. She insisted that Anabaptists were Christians “who accept Christ in all the essentials as we do”; yet they are “pursued as by a hunter with dogs chasing wild boars.” What an outrage. “Anyone,” she added, “who acknowledges Christ as the true Son of God and the sole Savior of mankind is welcome at my board.” Her hospitality was an ongoing aspect of her life. “I have been allowed to keep the parsonage which belongs to the parish. I take any one who comes. It is always full.”7
In her fight for Anabaptists and so-called radicals, she made a strong case for religious liberty long before the call for toleration in the seventeenth-century Enlightenment, arguing that a government had no right to punish individuals for matters of conscience. As a respected widow and mature Christian, Katherine personally visited those sick and in prison, wrote tracts, edited a hymnal, and preached. As a self-educated biblical scholar and theologian, she defended her right to do so.
You remind me that the Apostle Paul told women to be silent in the church. I would remind you of the word of this same apostle that in Christ there is no longer male nor female and of the prophecy of Joel: “I will pour my spirit upon all flesh and your sons and your daughters will prophesy.” I do not pretend to be John the Baptist rebuking the Pharisees. I do not claim to be Nathan upbraiding David. I aspire only to be Balaam’s ass, castigating his master.8
But there were many who were threatened by Katherine’s strong personality and the perception that she was overstepping biblical prescriptions for women. Indeed, to the very end of her life, despite her selfless service, she was hounded by detractors. One such individual was Ludwig Rabus, a younger cleric whom she had known well and who had lived in her home. But when she did not as a matter of course support all his opinions, he turned against her, accusing her of disturbing the peace of the church. “A disturber of the peace am I?” she indignantly shot back. “Yes indeed, of my own peace. . . . I have visited the plague infested and carried out the dead. I have visited those in prison and under sentence of death. Often for three days and three nights I have neither eaten nor slept. . . . Is this disturbing the peace of the church?”9
Katherine simply could not be pushed around by someone like Rabus. Nor was she deferential to him whose so-called doctorate didn’t impress her one whit. From his perspective, she carried her concepts of religious liberty to an extreme.
Perhaps so. She was in her sixties, sick in bed, the hour past midnight when she heard a knock at the door. The grieving man’s wife had died, and he wanted her to officiate at a surreptitious graveside service before dawn. The woman was considered a radical—a Reformation heretic. Katherine agreed. When town leaders learned, they were determined to reprimand her. The flap ended in a draw. She died before the documents were drawn up.
ARGULA VON STAUFFER GRUMBACH
“A Singular Instrument of Christ”
She was born into Bavarian nobility in 1492 (when Columbus “sailed the ocean blue”). Wealthy and well educated and for a time a lady-in-waiting to the queen, Argula led a life that was anything but tranquil. Political turmoil, religious reform, and leftover pockets of the plague served to make central Europe a dangerous place to live. While she was yet in her teens, her parents both died of that scourge, and some years later her uncle, a high court official (who had become her guardian), was embroiled in a royal scandal and executed for his alleged crimes. Amid her rage at the awful injustice, she found nowhere to turn but to God.
Raised in a religious family, Argula had from childhood found solace in Scripture. When she was ten years old, her father had given her a gift of a beautifully illustrated Koberger Bible, a treasure that she repeatedly read and memorized. Such activity, however, was considered highly objectionable by Catholic clerics, who feared reading the Bible would lead to dissent. Their fears were actualized in Argula.
Indeed, her admiration of Martin Luther was based largely on his emphasis on the Bible and his demand that church tradition be validated by Scripture. To Argula his teachings were a breath of fresh air. But her freedom to interact with religious ideas was thwarted by her husband, Friedrich von Grumbach, whom she had married in 1516, the year her uncle was executed. The following year Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, and nothing would ever be the same again.
Although her husband was not particularly interested in the Bible or religious ideas, he was caught up in the conflict politically. And from his vantage point it was advantageous to support the Catholic side of the controversy. The mother of four children, Argula became so taken up in the religious excitement of the day that she was accused by some of neglecting her household. In 1523, with the publication of Luther’s tracts and his translation of the New Testament, she took a bold stand and was soon in the thick of it.
Arsacius Seehofer, an eighteen-year-old university-educated teacher, had been arrested and exiled for his refusal to recant his Lutheran beliefs. Such an incident would have easily gone unnoticed but for Argula’s involvement. She wrote a letter, citing more than eighty Scripture references, that stands to this day as a monument to the Protestant Reformation. Her salutation, with perhaps more than a hint of disdain, belies her fury: “To the honorable, worthy, highborn, erudite, noble, stalwart Rector and all the Faculty of the University of Ingolstadt.”10 So much for niceties.
The opening lines of the letter lay out her position: “When I heard what you had done to Arsacius Seehofer under terror of imprisonment and the stake, my heart trembled and my bones quaked. What have Luther and Melanchthon taught save the Word of God? You have condemned them. You have not refuted them.”
She then went on to accuse them of “pull[ing] God, the prophets and the apostles out of heaven with papal decretals drawn from Aristotle, who was not a Christian at all.” She likewise demanded to know: “Where do you read in the Bible that Christ, the apostles, and the prophets imprisoned, banished, burned, or murdered anyone?” Such a terrible crime will soon be “known to all the world.”11 And soon it was—when her letter was printed as a pamphlet and widely distributed.
What kind of a woman would stir a ruckus like this? Her accusers were many. She was a “daughter of Eve,” worse than that, “a shameless whore.” But she also had supporters in high places. One German reformer praised her for knowing more of the Bible than all the “red hats” (cardinals and canon lawyers) combined. She might have relished being at the center of the debate but for the criticism of those who had most to lose—her family.
Despite the personal cost, however, she refused to be intimidated. In fact, she dared the members of the Diet of Nürnberg to a debate, and they took the bait. Unfortunately for her, she was not taken seriously. In her assessment, “the princes [took] the Word of God no more seriously than a cow does a game of chess.”12 Many others, however, were taking the Word of God seriously and were playing the game of chess with great skill. Among them, Martin Luther, whom she had met in person in 1530.
Sidling up to this audacious monk—and university professor—was very risky, and she paid a heavy price. “I understand that my husband will be deposed from his office. I can’t help it. God will feed my children as he feeds the birds and will clothe them as the lilies of the field.”13
Luther’s own words in a letter to a friend confirm her precarious situation:
The Duke of Bavaria rages above measure, killing, crushing and persecuting the gospel with all his might. That most noble woman, Argula von Stauffer, is there making a valiant fight with great spirit, boldness of speech and knowledge of Christ. . . . Her husband, who treats her tyrannically, has been deposed from his prefecture. . . . She alone, among these monsters, carries on with firm faith, though, she admits not without inner trembling. She is a singular instrument of Christ.14
“A singular instrument of Christ.” Although she would carry on in her reform efforts for several more years, those words offer a fitting epitaph for her life’s work.
RENÉE OF FERRARA
Reformer and Friend of John Calvin
Had I had a beard I would have been the king of France.
I have been defrauded by that confounded
Salic law [which denied women succession to the throne].15
Though minus a beard, Renée lacked nothing of boldness or brilliance. She was anything but a princess of fairy tales and little-girl dress-up parties. Nor was she the first French woman of royal birth to make a name for herself in Reformation Europe. Marguerite of Navarre and Jeanne d’Albret had also espoused Protestant principles from inside palaces. And like Renée they had taken great risks.
Though Renée did not articulate fine points of doctrine, as had Marguerite, she stands alone in her spirited interaction with her mentor, John Calvin, and her refusal to kowtow to his demands. Born in 1510, she was a year younger than Calvin, who regarded her as a royal trophy. And no wonder. Her father was King Louis XII of France, her mother Anne the Duchess of Brittany, the richest woman in all of Europe. With no brothers (or half-brothers), Renée would have succeeded her father, but for the Salic law. Instead, a nephew inherited the throne, and she became a political pawn in her father’s foreign alliances.
Matchmaking deals were in the works when she was but a child, and at seventeen she was married off to Ercole, son of Italy’s infamous Lucrezia Borgia. Her new home at the court in Ferrara was at the very center of the Italian Renaissance. She had everything that a princess could want—a lavish palace, priceless art, manicured gardens, dazzling gowns, precious jewels, culinary delicacies, and a handsome husband. Renée’s plain features, according to one wag of the day, “were more than compensated by her superior intellect.”16 What Ercole most desired of her was an heir, and on that score she succeeded, bearing five children, including two sons, all in the space of seven years.
Marital bliss, however, was not aided by the fact that she was strong willed and did not play the part of a submissive wife, egged on in her independent ways by Calvin. Indeed, her religious sympathies would become a serious bone of contention. The Reformed movement had made significant inroads in France, and news of bloody persecution—perhaps conveyed by her friend and cousin Marguerite of Navarre—was alarming.
Renée could not turn down the call for help. When French “heretics” secretly sought refuge in Ferrara, she welcomed them without her husband’s knowledge. Among the fleeing heretics was Charles d’Espeville, aka John Calvin, who arrived in the spring of 1536 and stayed for a month. His influence on matters of theology was enormous, but she submitted to Calvin no more readily than she did to her husband.
From Calvin’s correspondence, however, it is clear that a friendship had developed. “If I address you, madam,” he wrote, “it is not from rashness or presumption, but pure and true affection to make you prevail in the Lord.” He was no doubt dazzled by her wealth and perceived influence. “When I consider the pre-eminence in which He has placed you,” he wrote her, “I think that, as a person of princely rank, you can advance the kingdom of Jesus Christ.” He went on to praise her spiritual maturity: “I observe in you such fear of God, and such a real desire to obey Him, that I should consider myself a castaway if I neglected the opportunity of being useful to you.”17
Renée, however, was caught between a rock and a hard place, and she carried on publicly as though she were a devoted Catholic. Calvin was more than a little upset: “I have heard that your domestics have been scandalized by the word of a certain preacher who says that one may go both to Mass and to the Lord’s Supper,” he wrote, alluding to her as well. “I cannot suffer a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I esteem the word of this preacher no more than the song of a jackdaw. . . . The Mass is an execrable sacrilege and an intolerable blasphemy.”18
Renée was caught in the middle. When word of her apostasy was reported to King Henry II, a staunch Catholic who had succeeded her father, he pleaded with his beloved “only aunt” to be “restored to the bosom of [their] holy mother church, cleansed and purified from those cursed dogmas and reprobate errors.” In order to help her in her restoration process, he informed her that the Inquisitor Ori would be coming to give her spiritual guidance. If she were to resist his kindly teaching, the king added, the inquisitor would bring her “to reason by severity.”19
When Ercole learned how devious his wife had been in sneaking the Reformed heresy into his very palace, he forcibly placed her under house arrest and threatened to place their daughters, Lucrezia and Leonora, in a convent. Her maternal instincts firing on all cylinders, Renée sent for a priest to hear her confession and administer communion. The solution worked. She was set free to care for her young girls.
Fleeing in disguise and with an alias, John Calvin himself had not hesitated to escape persecution in Paris, but now he scolded her. “I fear you have left the straight road to please the world,” he wrote her. “And indeed the devil has so entirely triumphed that we have been constrained to groan, and bow our heads in sorrow.”20 He told her to humble herself before God and come back to the faith, offering no counsel as to what she should do about her daughters. Although she did not attend mass in the years that followed, she did not enjoy the freedom of publicly professing her Reformed faith.
When Renée was approaching her fiftieth birthday, her husband died, and her oldest son, a staunch Catholic, succeeded his father as Duke of Ferrara. She had lived in Ferrara for more than three decades. The time was right. She returned to her beloved homeland to stay. She left behind her ministry to the poor and needy, many of whom wept at her departure. Back home she had more religious freedom, and her estate became a refuge for Reformed Christians fleeing persecution.
As she had in the past, she maintained her correspondence with Calvin, often on testy terms. When her daughter’s Catholic husband was assassinated, she was not ashamed of her sorrow, and she was furious that Calvin had consigned him to hell. She was also troubled that she was not permitted to be part of church decision making. One of Calvin’s former students, who had been assigned to keep Renée on the straight and narrow, discovered that she was no pushover. “Renée wants to attend the meetings of the synod,” he wrote to Calvin. “But if Paul thought that women should be silent in the church, how much more should they not participate in the making of decisions. How will the Papists and the Anabaptists scoff to see us run by women!”21
Renée wanted her voice heard and resented the fact that the Salic law had denied her the crown and that a set of arbitrary rules would silence her at a synod—especially when so much was at stake. She decried the religious persecution of any stripe, and that included the terrible atrocities conducted against Catholics by Reformed vigilantes in France. To “Monsieur Calvin,” she wrote: “I am distressed that you do not know how the half in this realm behave. They even exhort simple women to kill and strangle. This is not the rule of Christ. I say this out of the great affection which I hold for the Reformed religion.”22
To the very end Renée fought for religious toleration, but it would be a lost cause. In 1572, she would learn of the carnage carried out against Protestants—a slaughter of thousands that would forever be remembered as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. She lived on for two more very sad years and was then laid to rest in France, even, as many feared, was the Reformed faith.
ELIZABETH DIRKS
Teacher, Preacher, Deaconess, Martyr
The year was 1549. The setting was a house in the Netherlands, the town of Leeuwarden. The young refugee had been hiding there in plain sight. Roman Catholic authorities tracked her down, thinking she was the wife of the well-known “heretic” and Anabaptist leader Menno Simons. She was not, but her story of conviction and courage would be indelibly marked in blood in the annals of martyrdom for ages to come. There was little on which Catholics and Protestants agreed in this era of religious rancor, except for the belief that Anabaptists ought to be put to death.
That Catholic authorities would have a particular interest in Elizabeth Dirks was not surprising since she had spent much of her life in a convent. And the questions they asked her clearly indicated that she had abandoned her convent education. They demanded to know what she believed about the sacraments of the mass and baptism—and whether she had been rebaptized.
Her responses reflected standard Anabaptist teachings. Mass no longer meant anything to her, and neither the Lord’s Supper nor baptism was a sacrament. Regarding a second baptism, she responded: “No, my lords, I have not been re-baptized. I have been baptized once upon my faith; for it is written that baptism belongs to believers.”23
Born into Frisian nobility, Elizabeth was shipped off to a convent at a young age where some time later she learned of the persecution and martyrdom of Anabaptists through the social media of the day. Printing in the sixteenth century was comparable to the internet today. Whether through pamphlets or word of mouth, forbidden religious messages found their way beyond the barriers of brick walls. What most stunned young Elizabeth was that people were willing to die for their faith. She had known all about the practice of killing for the cause of the church, but to refuse to fight back and die for one’s beliefs was an amazing concept.
In addition to heretical tracts, Bibles had made their way into convents, and Elizabeth, under lax supervision, had secretly studied a copy of a Latin Bible. That Anabaptist beliefs were supported with Scripture verses impressed her, as had the claim that much of Catholic belief and practice was not supported by Scripture, or worse, was contradicted by Scripture. Monasticism itself, she soon realized, was not practiced in New Testament times. Deep in the heart of convent life, a new world was opening up to her. Perhaps not surprisingly, she was unable to keep her discoveries to herself. When word of her deviant ideas leaked out, she was placed in quarantine—convent arrest. Soon after, through her own ingenuity and the help of others, she escaped, disguising herself as a milkmaid.
In Leeuwarden, Elizabeth refused to live a life underground. Instead, though obviously not wearing a nun’s habit, she went about town functioning as an evangelist, teacher, and preacher. Had she quietly practiced her faith behind closed doors, she likely would have avoided inquisitors’ questions. But she dared to speak her mind right under their noses. When she was hauled in for questioning, she might have nuanced her answers. Instead she quoted long passages from the Latin Bible that, at least to her way of thinking, proved that Catholics themselves were the real heretics.
Even then, had she been willing to simply name some Anabaptists as her teachers, she might have avoided torture. But she refused to implicate anyone but herself. So the screw torture was inflicted—so tight that her fingernails spurted blood. Screws were also applied to her shins and elsewhere. She cried out for mercy but refused to divulge names. So severe was the torture that she fell unconscious. Such a death, her tormentors realized, was too easy and would defeat their purpose. They revived her, fastened heavy weights to her body, tied her inside a bag, and deposited her alive and fully conscious into the icy waters of the Potmarge on March 27, 1549.
CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
Drowning Anabaptists, who believed in adult immersion, has since been dubbed the cruelest joke of the Reformation: If they insist on rebaptism, we’ll gladly comply! The story of Elizabeth is difficult to read. Her prolonged torture and cruel death were not carried out by a totalitarian regime or by terrorists. Rather by professing Christians. And Catholics were certainly not alone in their pursuit of peaceful Anabaptists. The Swiss and German Reformers also took part in executing other Christians, as did church leaders in the British Isles and the Puritan divines in America.
John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, and papal emissaries have sometimes been excused because they did not have the benefit of the Enlightenment—the philosophical movement that swept Europe in the eighteenth century and demanded, among other things, religious toleration. But Katherine Zell was hardly a product of the Enlightenment. She was outraged that people were being executed for their so-called heresies. She cited “the poor Servetus” in particular, who was burned at the stake in Geneva, when Calvin had the power to prevent it. Too many history books have unfortunately left this wise woman out of their pages, though she stands forever as a monument to religious toleration amid the hysterical voices of the Reformation.
Renée censured John Calvin on matters of religious toleration. Again, he could have stepped in and called on his followers to stop their vicious attacks on Catholics. But he did not. Nor did he offer understanding and true pastoral counseling to Renée when she was threatened with the loss of her little girls. As mothers and daughters we can only cringe at his callousness.
Though all four of these women demonstrated incredible fortitude in the face of danger, the most determined and outspoken of them all was Argula. Though she had everything to lose, it is a credit to her convictions and chutzpah that she dared to stand up to theological thugs. She stood tall before the Diet of Nürnberg and cited one scripture after another to support her beliefs. She was fearless, “though not without inner trembling.” Luther’s words still ring out today: “She alone, among these monsters, carries on with firm faith . . . a singular instrument of Christ.”24
QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT
Do you agree with Katherine’s defense-of-marriage argument—that marrying a priest is a ministry? Is there any justification in the Roman Catholic Church’s forbidding priests to marry?
How should we respond to individuals like Katherine who have lost their gaiety and find little pleasure in life after the loss of a loved one? Have you ever sought to help bring someone out of deep depression?
Have you ever known a mother like Argula, who seemed to put ministry above domestic concerns? Should Luther’s praise of her have been more tempered? Did Calvin expect too much of Renée by way of ministry and fail to understand her concerns as a mother?
Are women more likely than men to be less concerned about fine points of doctrine and more concerned about ecumenical harmony? In what ways did these four women speak out or show empathy for those who were being persecuted? Do you admire or fear people who seek to bring unity among Christians?
Would you, like Elizabeth, be willing to die for your faith in Christ? Would you be willing to die for particular beliefs associated with your faith? Would you have advised Elizabeth to agree to be a good Catholic in order to avoid execution?
Which of these women do you think would be the most effective minister—or minister’s wife—in your congregation?